The Decline of Fertility in Non-European Industrialized Countries

Abstract

This article presents a quantitative description of change in fertility and the proximate determinants thereof, derived from primary and secondary sources, for non-European industrialized countries since World War II. Table 1 presents annual period total fertility rates since 1945 in each of the countries considered. These rates are graphed in Figure 1. Good correspondence exists in the general shape of the graphs among all English-speaking countries, with a hill-shaped pattern evident in all. The descent from the peak is fastest in the United States and Canada and, for an extended period, slowest in New Zealand. Japan, on the other hand, experienced an earlier rapid decline between 1947 and 1961, followed by a long plateau with a slightly declining slope. A peak fertility of 3.5-4.2 children per woman in the English-speaking countries was reached somewhere between 1957 and 1961. Whatever the initial starting point and pattern during the first 30 years of these series, it is evident that all five countries had reached a common range of 1.7-2.0 children per woman by the early 1980s. These trends are not related in any immediately obvious way to national economic performance. For example, economic growth was extraordinarily rapid in Japan in both the 1950s and 1960s; the former decade produced a very rapid fall in fertility and the latter, a slight rise. There is even less correspondence between international levels of fertility and levels of real income. Japan had below-replacement fertility in 1960 at a per capita real income that was only one-fifth of the US level of 1980, and only 28 percent of its own 1980 income. New Zealand has yet to reach the income level of the United States in 1960, but has a total fertility rate that is 47 percent lower. The absence of simple mechanistic relations with fertility is shared by other development indicators. For example, the below-replacement fertility of Japan in 1962 was achieved with a labor force participation rate in paid employment outside the home for married women of only 12.6 percent, compared